Fast and automatic detection and segmentation of unknown objects

This paper focuses on the fast and automatic detection and segmentation of unknown objects in unknown environments. Many existing object detection and segmentation methods assume prior knowledge about the object or human interference. However, an autonomous system operating in the real world will often be confronted with previously unseen objects. To solve this problem, we propose a segmentation approach named Automatic Detection And Segmentation (ADAS). For the detection of objects, we use symmetry, one of the Gestalt principles for figure-ground segregation to detect salient objects in a scene. From the initial seed, the object is segmented by iteratively applying graph cuts. We base the segmentation on both 2D and 3D cues: color, depth, and plane information. Instead of using a standard grid-based representation of the image, we use super pixels. Besides being a more natural representation, the use of super pixels greatly improves the processing time of the graph cuts, and provides more noise-robust color and depth information. The results show that both the object-detection as well as the object-segmentation method are successful and outperform existing methods.